He sent us dancing our way home to Beatrice Street. Matthews may have worn plain brown boots, not red shoes, but they glittered more brightly than anything a lad who loved football would ever see on the silver screen.
3
BEGINNING THE GREAT ADVENTURE
ST ALOYSIUS IN Newcastle was one of those few schools which gave hungry lads like me something to eat and drink after the game, but it was the gift I received out on their well-manicured field that I would remember most clearly. My Bedlington Grammar School team-mates lifted me on to their shoulders after I scored the winning goal in a match which we had looked certain to lose. When I think on it now, it was my first ‘Roy of the Rovers’ moment.
It was as though I was playing under a spell, one that created the feeling that anything I wanted to achieve was within my grasp if I applied myself enough. Before this I had known plenty of success in school colours. Back at North Hirst Primary, the sports master Mr McGuinness had sometimes told me to hold back a little, particularly once when we were hammering in goals against weaker opposition and it looked as if we might go on from a 12–0 lead to a cricket score. He said that it was bad sportsmanship to humiliate opponents – but the match against St Aloysius was quite different.
They had some big strong lads and they could play a bit. They came at us hard and were leading by a couple of goals when I realised, maybe more clearly than ever before, that I could really influence a game, shape it according to my will. The more the St Aloysius players paid attention to me, the more I thrived under the pressure. I felt myself growing with every kick. When I volleyed home the winner it was a perfect climax.
Every game was a challenge to me, I desperately wanted to win every time I played, and it would be false modesty to say that I hadn’t realised very early in my life that football came to me more easily than it did to most of my friends. When two big lads picked the teams at Hirst Park, the one with the first choice would almost always say, ‘I want Bobby.’ It was a natural thing, something I had come to expect, but then what happened at St Aloysius seemed to me to belong in another category. It was a wonderful, dawning sense of the power of my ability. I was determined not to lose, and I told myself I would do anything I could to prevent it. When it happened, when we pulled ourselves back into game and I sensed the tremendous excitement and confidence building among my team-mates, it became the most important challenge I had faced.
When I scored the winning goal I had never been so pleased on a football field – and then, when the final whistle went, and the boys lifted me up, for once I didn’t push them away. I thought to myself, ‘Tanner is right. If you try hard enough, if you really want something, you can get it.’
Soon enough there seemed to be no limit to the scale of my adventure. Scouts were beginning to watch me as I made the East Northumberland Boys team and then the Northumberland Juniors. By the time I was picked for England Schoolboys there was no doubt that I would get the chance to join my uncles and Jackie Milburn in the professional ranks.
First though, my future had to be guaranteed beyond the risks of football. My mother was emphatic about this, and looking back I can see more clearly why she would make this point so strongly. Frequently she voiced the question that, because of the background of her family, was never far from her mind: what if you are injured seriously, what, then, do you make of your life? For me such a disaster was not even a speck on the horizon – and nor would it ever be, a fact which, when I think of all the games I have played, is not the least of the miracles of my career. Today I’m walking around with my cartilages still intact and without the nag of any of those chronic injuries which have accompanied many of my fellow professionals so deep into their retirement.
For an example of the risk levels, even many years after I became a pro a cartilage problem still meant your chances of survival in the game could be rated no higher than 50-50. The operation was primitive and was more than anything an act of faith and optimism. They cut into your knee, removed the loose bits of cartilage, drained the fluid and then, when you came right down to it, they hoped for the best. It was a lottery that my mother, for all her passion for football, was not prepared to play on my behalf – and if this threatened to be a serious problem for me when she insisted, for a little while, that I continued my education even as I tried to establish myself at Manchester United, there is no doubt that she was acting as a responsible parent. For me, however, anything that got in the way of football was something between an irritant and an outright nuisance.
The first time the football-versus-education issue arose seriously, however, my mother, with the support of Tanner, fought hard to make sure that my natural talent for the game was not allowed to dwindle in the wrong environment. The problem came when – somewhat surprisingly for a pupil who, no doubt like my brother Jack, would spend
